It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Brady v. Maryland
—and on the grounds
that there were issues with the way the grand jury that indicted me was
impaneled. When we took Anne Butler to court to get the tapes of her
interviews with prison officials about the Miller killing before my trial, her
testimony revealed that there may have been improprieties in selecting the
grand jurors.
Simino filed my direct appeal in 1999. I would have three chances with
this appeal in state court. First it went back to my trial judge. If he denied me,
it would go before the appellate court, and if that court denied me, I would go
before the Louisiana Supreme Court. I knew my appeal would be denied on
every level. State judges like to be seen as tough on crime. Institutional
racism was rampant, and still is. After all that, I could submit what’s called a
postconviction relief application (PCRA) in which we could include new

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evidence, which would take the same trajectory, starting with my trial judge.
If denied, it would go to the state appeals court; if it was denied there, it
would go before the Louisiana Supreme Court. Upon denial of my PCRA at
the state supreme court level I would be able to go to federal court.

---

2000–2010
They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.
—Mexican proverb used by the Zapatista movement

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Chapter 40
We Stand Together
January 1, 2000
. 
Another century. In order to leave Camp J a prisoner needed
to go 90 consecutive days at Level 3 without a write-up. King and Herman
were 30 days ahead of me in the program, but when they were eligible to
leave they refused to leave me behind. The reclass board put them back in
their cells at Camp J. This was not only an act of defiance on their part but
also unity. King and Herman were so insistent they weren’t leaving without
me that when I was eligible to leave the program a month later, prison
officials moved me back first. Then they moved King and Herman back a
week apart. They put us all on different tiers in CCR.
Support for us from outside the prison had grown while we were at Camp
J. At first, people wrote to me because of my trial. When they found out
about Herman, they extended their support to him and started writing to him.
They wrote to us asking to be put on our visiting lists. We were each allowed
10 people on our list. When my list was full I directed people to get on
King’s list. If they coordinated visits with people on Herman’s and King’s
lists we could all visit together. When white people started visiting us many
of the security officers were shocked. It didn’t compute with their belief
system. Our supporters were both black and white. Shana Griffin; Brice
White; Anita Yesho; Opal Joyner; former Panthers Althea Francois, Marion
Brown, and Malik Rahim; and others were in New Orleans. Marina
Drummer, Gail Shaw, Millie Barnett, and Scott Fleming were in California;
and Leslie George and Anne Pruden were in New York. While we were
locked up at Camp J, with limited access to phone and mail, they formed a
support committee and started calling me and Herman the Angola 2. While I
was grateful, it didn’t feel right to me. We were three, not two. King was a
Panther who was wrongfully accused and unjustly convicted. He made all the
same sacrifices that Herman and I made. He lived by the same moral

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principles we did. We stood together in all the same battles and were beaten,
gassed, and locked up the same. He was kept in solitary confinement because
of his political beliefs too, for 28 years. The three of us had been through so
much together. Now was not the time to separate. I wrote to Herman and
asked: Now that we have a support committee, shouldn’t King benefit from
it? Shouldn’t we become the Angola 3? Herman agreed.
I practically had to jump King to get him to do it. We were on the yard.
He said no. He thought Herman and I should take advantage of the
momentum that was growing around the Angola 2; he didn’t want to take any
attention away from us. I looked at him. King is one of the most selfless
people I know. If he had 1,000 drops of water he’d give them to 1,000 thirsty
people and go without. “King,” I said, “we are stronger together. We can’t
start letting something come between us now.” “Ask the members on the
committee.” he finally said. “If they agree, then OK.” Herman and I wrote to
our core supporters asking them to request a contact visit on a certain date.
Miraculously those visits were all approved. The guard on duty allowed us to
put two tables together in the visiting room so we could sit together. Herman
and I told everyone our decision. Nobody objected. The A3 was born. The
Angola 2 Support Committee became the National Coalition to Free the
Angola 3, and it grew in numbers.
In the meantime, King, Herman, and I had been working on another civil
lawsuit claiming that our decades of being locked down 23 hours a day in
solitary confinement violated our 8th Amendment protection against cruel
and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court had ruled that the Constitution
“does not mandate comfortable prisons . . . but neither does it permit
inhumane ones.” The suit also claimed that our right to due process was
being denied because the 90-day review board at Angola was a sham, a
violation of the 14th Amendment. We also stated that our 1st Amendment
right to freedom of speech was being violated because the reason we were
being held in CCR for decades was our political beliefs. Herman wrote to the
ACLU of Louisiana in New Orleans and asked for help. One of the
organization’s attorneys, Al Shapiro, got back to us and the ACLU filed the
suit on our behalf on March 30, 2000, in state court in Baton Rouge against
Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections secretary Richard
Stalder and Angola warden Burl Cain, among others. (Later state Corrections
defendants removed it to federal court to obtain a whiter jury pool.) Our suit

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requested an injunction from the court to stop the state from keeping us in
CCR, to force the prison to move us back into the general prison population.
We also asked for punitive damages as well as attorney fees and court costs.
Our supporters in New Orleans met weekly, sometimes at Malik’s house,
other times in an empty church. They held yard sales, and second line
concerts to raise money for attorneys and investigators for us. They created
posters to make people aware of us. Scott Fleming, who had graduated from
law school in 1999; and Leslie George, a producer and reporter for Pacifica
Radio in New York, met in New Orleans and worked on tracking down new
leads on our case, interviewing former prisoners and looking up old court
records. Marina Drummer, in Oakland, secured 501(c)(3) status for our
support committee under the name Community Futures Collective, which
allowed us to actively raise funds and recruit lawyers and investigators.
(Marina would serve as the fiscal and administrative center for our support
committee from that time forward.) Others wrote about us on blogs and
reached out to mainstream newspapers and TV news programs asking for
coverage of us; none responded. The only national newspaper that wrote
about us in the early days was